OPINION: It snowed in New England in winter. Wow.

By Jeff Mill

Friday, January 3, 2014

Did you make it? Were you OK? Did you survive it?

No, not Thursday’s snow, but the media hysteria that preceded it.

The hysteria began with threat of “a major winter storm – the first of 2014 – barreling into the Northeast,” and proceeded on from there to whip up a frenzy of dire predictions and increasingly inflammatory rhetoric.

And the result of all this was – what the local forecasters pretty much had been saying: on average, 5-6 inches – the same amount that the region received in the week before Christmas.

Except that snow came minus this week’s hysteria.

True, Boston and the North Shore got considerably more snow from Thursday’s storm.

But, stripped of the histrionics, what happened was that it snowed in New England in January. Wow. Who’da thunk it?

The feverish efforts by the media, television and print, to out-do one another with their Chicken-Little-like projections of impending doom might be excused except for one fact: last February — 11 months ago — we had a real blizzard, which dropped 34 inches of snow on the region.

Who to blame for this new wave of feverish forecasting doom?

The Weather Channel.

Well, them and news editors who, lemming-like, fall in line with the “We’re all going to die!” approach to any weather event.

The Weather Channel used to be a slightly boring recitation of the coming weather. When they actually put a map up on the screen, that was a big deal.

But who wants the plain old weather when you can have weather as drama instead?

And so, ladies and gentlemen, behold “Killer Storms” and other hyperbolic takes on the weather.

Twain was wrong. Everybody talks about the weather, but the Weather Channel did something about it: it jazzed it up. It became theme-park weather, with chills and spills.

And local TV quickly followed.

No more does it just rain or snow: now every weather event has to have a name, like “Winter Storm Ashford & Simpson.”

Naming weather events became like giving every child on a school team a trophy just for participating.

Were new editors afraid storms would develop an inferiority complex if they didn’t have a name? Why should hurricanes have all the glory?

But if every snow event becomes the storm that could kill you, how to separate routine events like Thursday’s snow from a 34-inch blizzard?

People are already becoming immune to warnings about hurricanes, ignoring the chance that a hurricane could in fact kill you and rushing out to grab cellphone video of the storm as it happens.

One of the reasons the 1938 hurricane was so deadly was because there had not been a really bad East Coast storm in decades, so people by and large didn’t appreciate the power of a really big, fast-moving weather event.

Sharks reaped the benefit of their ignorance.

Granted, we live in an age of declining standards. But could we at least make the effort to understand that six inches of snow isn’t the same as 34 inches, and take a big deep breath and exhale and relax the next time it snows in New England in winter?